A salary comparison of database administrators or DBA's in eight countries, based on WageIndicator figures, shows that with increasing experience, their salaries tend to fall behind. Many with added supervisory duties, are not rewarded for this increase in responsibility.
Database administrators, according to the official description, design, develop, control, maintain and support the optimal performance and security of databases. Usually they are employed by larger companies, so the comparison was limited to DBA’s in companies with more than 500 employees. As the occupation has relatively few possibilities for an extended career, we moreover only compared salaries of those with two and ten years of experience.
On average after ten years, database administrators earn only 20 percent more compared to those with two years of experience. The only exception to this worldwide trend are women in Poland who only saw a 10 percent increase in salary afterten years of experience.
A remarkable finding is that in Western Europe the gender gap in pay is almost zero. However in Spain the gender pay gap is 20 percent and it reaches 30 percent in Poland,South Africa and India.
Having a supervisory position has only a marginal effect on the salary differences. The notable exception is India, where database administrators with supervisory duties earn up to 25 percent more. In other countries the increase is less than 10 percent and often under 5 percent.
We did not investigate the outsourcing market, but looking at the huge salary differences, there should be opportunities. At least part of the database work can be done remotely and all database administrators need a more than basic understanding of English anyhow to deal with the needed software and backup.
Regional differences in pay are huge, even between East and West Germany up to 25 percent. And again male database administrators in Spainare half the price of those in East Germany and female database administrators in Spain are even cheaper than men. Poland is at least 20 cheaper than Spain. South Africa though is relatively expensive, with salaries just above the Spanish level. India beats everybody else in terms of salaries. Here female DBA’s are about one tenth of the price of their colleagues in the Netherlands andWest Germany.
We investigated salaries in Germany (East and West), Spain, the Netherlands, India, South Africa, Poland and the US.
Many more countries have salary checks online, but in those countries not enough database administrators have been entering their own data. To improve our data of your job, please fill in our surveys at the different national websites.
Earlier we made comparisons also for pr-managers, lawyers, economists, nurses, truck drivers and HR-managers.